Welcome to the website of the Digital Media Law Project. The DMLP was a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society from 2007 to 2014. Due to popular demand the Berkman Klein Center is keeping the website online, but please note that the website and its contents are no longer being updated. Please check any information you find here for accuracy and completeness.

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any
work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is
not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment,
bequest, or otherwise.

When the White House photos first appeared on Flickr in April, Fred Benenson of Creative Commons and others pointed out that the government couldn't grant a CC license on content to which it didn't own the copyright and hypothesized that the administration likely chose a CC Attribution license as the least restrictive option available to it because Flickr "doesn’t allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world." (As Hugh D'Andrade of EFF pointed out, Flickr does have a public domain option (of sorts) on the "Commons" portion of its site, which acts as a repository for certain public photography collections. This "No known copyright restrictions" label, however, is only available to participating institutions like The Library of Congress and The Brooklyn Museum.)

It's great to see both Flickr and the administration responding quickly to the concerns of the public and legal commentators expressed in humble Internet discussions (As Wired/Epicenter puts it, "Someone must have been listening"). Too bad there's still no public domain designation available to ordinary users of Flickr, but progress is progress, and hopefully Flickr is still listening.

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About this Blog

Contributors to this blog include a diverse group of lawyers, law professors, law students, and others with an interest in new media. The views expressed are solely those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the DMLP or the institutions with which they are affiliated. To learn more about the DMLP, please click here.

We are looking for contributing authors with expertise in media law, intellectual property, First Amendment, and other related fields to join us as guest bloggers. If you are interested, please contact us for more details.

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